I was listening to Maximum Geek 5 on the subway this
morning, and was struck with the need to comment on it.

To start off with, damn Jeff and Josh (the two hosts) are some huge
geeks! (And this coming from someone who wrote a Palm conduit to post to his weblog.)
What I mean is that listening to them takes me right back to my days in the
Computer Science Club
at the University of Waterloo,
complete with interrupting each other in the middle of sentences and
misquoting Monty Python.

Second, Jeff Kirvin is perhaps the most naive, and I mean that in the
nicest way, person I have ever heard speak. While I'ld like to believe
that people would pay for content that I could get for free, I just don't
have that much faith in human nature, and sadly, my experience seems to
bear out my conclusions. I think that at this point in time on the
Internet, paying for something is always harder than not paying for it, so
you need to add some sort of value to the paying copy.

Which means that the New York
Times has completely the wrong idea. It's true that they've cut
themselves off from the rest of the web, and are only harming themselves by
doing so. (They're a newspaper, why not make the current month
pay-to-read, and open up the archives? Surely their main selling point is
commentary on what's currently going on!) So, I have the following
suggestion for Solo Media: Put up
text-only versions of your serials. By "text-only" I don't just mean
versions without any formatting, because given the existance of
alt.binaries.e-books, and the fact that the first few doc readers couldn't
support formatting, having a non-formatted version is clearly not enough of
a difference to get people to pay. What I really mean "text-only" is that
you should remove all the punctuation, and force capital letters into
lowercase as well! It's very rare that people search for a comma, or a semi-colon, and
most-if-not-all of the search engines are case-insensitive these days, so
lowercasing everything won't hurt your searchability. It will allow people
to quickly find which episode memorable text is located in (and
approximately where in that episode it is), And it will even give people
the flavour of the stuff you're writing, but it will also make it much
harder to read, and probably hard enough that it won't be worth the time to
try to fix it.

So that's my idea for you guys. Feel free to use it, and spread it
around. I hope you like it, and may you grow rich off of it.